(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, David Fickling, a columnist for Bloomberg)
Where would science fiction be without space mining?
From Ellen Ripley in Alien and Dave Lister in Red Dwarf, to Sam Bell in Moon and The Expanse’s Naomi Nagata, the grittier end of interstellar drama would be bereft if it weren’t for overalled engineers and their mineral-processing operations.
It’s such an alluring vision that real money has been put toward its realization. Alphabet Inc.’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron (director of the Alien sequel Aliens) all invested in Planetary Resources Inc., which raised venture finance with its mission of mining high-value minerals from asteroids and refining them into metal foams that could be shot back down to Earth.
Deep Space Industries Inc., a rival startup, also had bold plans to extract resources from space. Though both companies have now been bought out and their projects put into mothballs, the idea of a space mining industry has refused to die.
Humanity’s failure to exploit extraterrestrial ore reserves isn’t a sign that we lack imagination
It’s wonderful that people are shooting for the stars — but those who declined to fund the expansive plans of the nascent space mining industry were right about the fundamentals. Space mining won’t get off the ground in any foreseeable future — and you only have to look at the history of civilization to see why.
One factor rules out most space mining at the outset: gravity. On one hand, it guarantees that most of the solar system’s best mineral resources are to be found under our feet. Earth is the largest rocky planet orbiting the sun. As a result, the cornucopia of minerals the globe attracted as it coalesced is as rich as will be found this side of Alpha Centauri.
Gravity poses a more technical problem, too. Escaping Earth’s gravitational field makes transporting the volumes of material needed in a mining operation hugely expensive. On Falcon Heavy, the large rocket being developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, transporting a payload to the orbit of Mars comes to as little as $5,357 per kilogram — a drastic reduction in normal launch costs.
Still, at those prices just lofting a single half-tonne drilling rig to the asteroid belt would use up the annual exploration budget of a small mining company.
Power is another issue. The international space station, with 35,000 square feet of solar arrays, generates up to 120 kilowatts of electricity. That drill would need a similar-sized power plant — and most mining companies operate multiple rigs at a time.
Lofting a single half-tonne drilling rig to the asteroid belt would use up the annual exploration budget of a small mining company
Power demands rise drastically once you move from exploration drilling to mining and processing. Bringing material back to Earth would raise the costs even more. Japan’s Hayabusa2 satellite spent six years and 16.4 billion yen ($157 million) recovering a single gram of material from the asteroid Ryugu and returning it to Earth earlier this month.
What might you want to mine from space? Water is an essential component of most earth-bound mining operations and a potential raw material for hydrogen-oxygen fuel that could be used in space.
The discovery in October of ice molecules in craters on the Moon was taken as a major breakthrough. Still, the concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million are extraordinarily low by terrestrial standards. Copper, which typically costs about $4,500 per metric tonne to refine, has an average ore grade of about 6,000 ppm.
The more promising commodities are platinum, palladium, gold and a handful of rare related metals. Because of their affinity for iron, these so-called siderophile elements mostly sunk toward the metallic core of our planet early in its formation, and are relatively scarce in the Earth’s crust. Estimates of their abundance on some asteroids, such as the enigmatic Psyche 16 beyond the orbit of Mars, suggest concentrations several times higher than can be found in terrestrial mines.
Still, human ingenuity is all about cutting our coat according to our cloth. If such platinum-group metals are going to justify the literally astronomical costs of space mining, they’ll need to count on sustained high prices for the decade or so that would be needed to get such an operation up and running — and that sort of situation is all but unheard-of in the materials industry.
When prices of an essential commodity get excessively high, chemists get extraordinarily good at finding ways to avoid using it, scrap merchants improve their recycling rates, and miners discover new deposits that wouldn’t have been viable at lower prices. Even criminals get in on the game.
That eventually pushes supply up and demand down, so that prices rebalance — a dynamic we’ve seen play out in the markets for rare earths, lithium and cobalt in recent years. The world mines about three times more platinum than it did in the early 1970s, but prices have barely changed once adjusted for inflation.
That might sound a disappointing prospect to those looking for excuses for humanity to colonize space — but really it should be seen as a tribute to our ingenuity. Humanity’s failure to exploit extraterrestrial ore reserves isn’t a sign that we lack imagination. If anything, it’s a sign of the adaptive genius that put us in orbit in the first place.
26 Comments
Josh
I would like to pitch to the writer, that i disagree on cost and markets.
Once infastructure for mining and refining in space is invested in and proved to work. The price of the materials will be worth considerably more, if we are building anything inspace, we will on longer need to pay $5000/kg to get basic materials into space for exploration and colonization as your mining and refining amd manufacturing infastructure will already have it. So that basic steel could be sold for $4500/kg for a example although to a limited market. What a profit that would be!! Wpuld end up making colonization of moon or mars and space exploration much cheaper.
Scott Gordon Taillet
I disagree, there are too many investors currently that want a return on their investment. And I am willing to bet & consider that when Elon Musk & NASA put their minds together, it will happen and in this lifetime. Beside aspirations to the Moon & Mars? They are looking at the Moons of Jupiter & Saturn. Those destinations are well beyond, the Astroid Belt. Futhermore the arrogate on the Moon itself, of Heluim 3 is what will sustain the Fission Reactor some are already built and just waiting for that element to be brought back. It is not just, Psyche 16 which holds the Mother Load of payout. Other lone astroids once X-rayed? Have deposits that far exceeds the normal expectation of earthly ones. Although it is practical that, earth holds true riches; the need to explore far out ways the cost. And if Space-X & NASA and others who are anxious to get their they will. Did you know, that companies that started out wanting to get into actual mining astroids were bought out? Who do you believe did that? Your article claims nothing of the sort. They were bought by Elon Musk and his partners. I didn’t see, the part where Musk has his own team to reach specifically Psyche 16 and once they do? They are going to leave a tracer on it. Making it much easier to track and get back to…This is what you get when people don’t do the inside homework, like I have read. Maybe, you might learn something by reading my Sophomoric Jr. College paper freely given to my States Attorney and Federal Attorney Robert Hanlon. My research is cited below…I came out learning something more and asking questions to myself? Optimism is a sign of accomplishment and Faith in God is that source…not money.
Ian St. John
It won’t happen overnight but it will happen. Another in a long series of ‘”if man was meant to fly, God would have given him wings. Lots of potential for mining, material separation, refining and manufacturing that cannot be done in gravity And while gravity put lots of material in the planet, mineable concentrations are relatively rare.
Leonard hermary
Sounds like someone has done a fishy repose to harden someone else’s scope to derail and have one undermine their acknowledgment of a more surreal reality like giving up ones own notion for someone else to benefit from. as in tentative and obtuse reticence and ubiquitous . Way too much adolescent jibberish. I cant say how many x’s from the beginning read I wanted to stop. Don’t get a writers job ever. Get your hands dirty on something… working.. Ps Not even worthy to be called tech jibberish and you know it. Hell I’m even scared to ask why you edited this but trust me – I don’t want to know
Martin Dimmock
Where’s all this material meant to go; Earth? It’s not viable to drop cost effective amounts of metals from orbit to earth yet, even if it was possible to mine asteroids.
I can’t see asteroid mining being viable until there’s some way of bringing the stuff back safely, presumably using some as yet unknown propulsive mechanism.
Patrick
Space is probably the ideal environment for material refinement. Mining? Most asteroids are just loose aggregates of various elements and compounds floating in clumps together. No drill rig necessary. The beauty of mining them is that the environment you’re doing it in is also ready for refinement. Look at titanium. Common as beach sand on Earth, but refining it here? Horribly difficult and expensive, not to mention environmentally destructive. In space you have no atmosphere to contend with. No worries of oxygen embrittlement or other forms of contamination or anything like that. You can refine high grade metals wherever you find them. Metals aren’t even the truly valuable things to find out there either. Volatiles like water, methane and other useful compounds will be the real prize finds. Colonization will happen and these will be the things that are the focus of space “mining.” Yeah, you’re probably not going to be bringing megatons of platinum back to Earth. That’s not how it’s going to work. It’s about insitu-resource management for space exploration and colonization. A lot of people are going to want in that.
Peter michael Swash
Cost will dictate whether asteroid mining is feasible. The chances of this happening is very close to zero. There is enough Ni, PGEs on earth. Increase the metal price then we would mine a lower grade. On this same subject – intergalactic travel – it would take over 50000 travelling years to get to the nearest star. Space is the final frontier- but let’s be realistic.
L. R. B. Mann
I’m extremely grateful to find this solid body of sense in a realm overloaded with fantasy.
The psychology of the crew is a sufficient reason why Emon Lusk’s nuisance ‘vision’ cannot be realised. USN submariners doing only c.60d out of contact with nature manifest at c.10% per y mental difficulties that require their removal to other tasks (according to a brave USN psychiatrist 3 decades ago). Henryk Skolimowski made the argument from psychology sufficiently in The Ecologist 4 decades ago. The notion of people living elsewhere is stupid fantasy.
Jeanette
I liked this article even though I disagree with the conclusion. The author has provided some interesting facts (cost if 1g of a Asteroid Ngyuru) however my mind went to context. The US military spend 800m$ on fighter jets….so the money is there if there is an interesting enough prospect! Go space mining!!
Johnny spitz
Propaganda article is propaganda. No surprise that this is lifted from a bloomberg opinion piece…
Stopped reading after I saw this:
“Japan’s Hayabusa2 satellite spent six years and 16.4 billion yen ($157 million) recovering a single gram of material from the asteroid Ryugu and returning it to Earth earlier”.
Why did I stop there? That gram of material had to return to earth in the same state it left the asteroid. Hayabusa2 is basically an interplanetary clean room. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom
Which is what drove the cost of that mission. The author has no justification to use it as a metric here.
I hope investors are smart enough to see through this type of propaganda.
Matthew Burch
Mining in space for use on Earth might be too expensive, but mining in space for large scale use in space will be a different matter entirely.
Hughie
Out there in space , there is hardly much life
Please just visit it and leave it untouched
Because when you start taking what dosent belong to you ,without permission,
The same can happen to us here on Earth .
And when a more powerfull and more advanced species of being starts mining here on Earth , they will cause chaos to our planet and could destroy our home , probably within a couple of months of them coming here
Tim
This writer is suffering small minded thinking, in space size isn’t a constraint and pollution really isn’t pollution in space its just another mineral pushed to vacuum that will be consumed in space. Why none the most precious natural resource and the only livable planet that is within 1000s of years with our current technology of space travel yet 3d printing and other mineral processing technology would be that far a stretch to be workable on a zero gravity environment.
Joel Topsom
Inter galactic mining will come faster than you think. Mankind’s knowledge is doubling every 5 years atm and still increasing at an exponential amount, considering spacex under musk want 1 mil people on mars by 2050 and are moving rapidly towards that goal, they will be mining mars in the foreseeable future.
Hughie
Please dont go mining in space
Alliens are very much more advanced tha we are
And when they come mining on earth, they will take evrything that we depend on for survival on our plannet
Handsome Deplorable
HUGHIE
Gunsmoke’s on !
Jordan
Within the next 10,000 years we will certainly be mining other terrestrial bodies. I imagine mining these bodies not necessarily to send back to Earth but more to obtain materials for construction of massive ship building yards, bases on the Moon, Mars, etc. Building a space elevator and then possibly using it to transport high value materials needed for more esoteric purposes on earth. That or we build rails guns that shoot protected pods into Earths oceans to then recover the contents.
Chris Williams
I’m not going to disagree point by point. But. The thing that you say will prevent us from mining asteroids is simply the startup costs? You really think that if the startup costs are too high no corporation would have ever gotten off the ground? That’s like saying that because it was to complicated the internal combustion engine should have been a failure, or that because using swords and bows was so much easier guns should never have been a major technological achievement. The startup cost for asteroid mining would be enormous, sure, but just one single asteroid bigger than 100m and with a concentration of gold higher than 5% will net literally trillions of dollars. Everything at that point becomes moot.
Christopher John Power
Mining for the express purpose of returning minerals to earth is hilariously stupid.
The whole point of mining in space is to reduce the required mass to be lifted out of earth’s gravity well.
With lifting costs stated in this article, ISRU becomes the only** solution to reduce costs of colonisation. These efforts won’t be funded by small mining company’s exploration budgets, they will be funded by eccentric trillionaires with national space agencies in tow, with space tourism taking the sting out of the bill in the near term.
Some of us are young enough today to see extraterrestrial mining in our lifetime. No one said it would be soon, but it is absolutely necessary.
Mitch King
I know it’s a personal opinion. But this is the sort of pretend “realist”, short sighted thinking that had scholars of past shot down or worse for thinking bigger and better than themselves. Using current values and ideals to justify it is lazy as well. Show a person 100yrs ago the extent and cost of mining today and they’d have fallen off their chair. Show me that growth vs the exponential increase in population and resource demand over the yrs, and then see if your ,it’s too expensive right now so it will always be expensive, idea sticks.
richard servatius
i’m waiting for humans to build nano-miners; billions of them. All would fit into a 8 oz. container and the cost of sending them to an asteroid relatively small. so it takes 50 years to reproduce and mine. it’s a one time cost, we would know if the transport fees are worth it, and meantime we can send off the same sort of rocket to Mars and Jupiter’s moons.
Mac
I’ve been greatly interested in this subject my whole life. Some of the challenges I wonder how we can solve are: type of drilling for prospecting: percussive or core? How will we keep the bit from getting stuck, how will we keep fluids from freezing (NO access to water for drilling lubricant!). How will samples be collected and analyzed so that decisions on what and where to mine can be made?
And once those paltry challenges are solved, just how in the heck do you mine an asteroid? It’s a mountain of loosely compacted primordial material, with its own rotation and gravity, but some might be closer to something like hard rock that could be difficult to break apart. How do you break it apart? Can you load core holes with explosive charges on an asteroid in space and blast them apart?
Or do you just grind off the outer skin of the rock into fragments and process those? That could be a substantial amount of work. Maybe something like a continuous coal miner with a rotary drum style grinder, to just abrade the surface of the rock into manageable chunks to be processed strip by strip?
And if you do, how do you contain the fragments, which will fly off into space in all directions, potentially causing you to lose all the ore you spent billions to claim! And you have just created a deadly hazard to navigation to future spacecraft with all the particles you’ve lobbed into space forever. Oops! Space is BIG, yes, but all it takes is a tiny little particle to wreck a spacecraft traveling at high speed.
I would guess you could erect some kind of gigantic mesh net around the rock, or the area to be mined to prevent fragments from drifting out of containment. But it seems to me containment will be quite a challenge.
This doesn’t even cover processing and refining. I think the only way to do this is as one operation: mining, processing and refining, all in space. And the material is never going to see the surface of the Earth. It would be used to build colonies and eventually a civilization in our own solar system. You would mine the material to build more spaceships and stations and surface colonies in space from material mined from asteroids.
Llewellyn
I have been researching the mining industry for investment purposes for the past 18 months. I’ve learned that mining is a dog’s game. Its expensive. A hundred and ten things can go wrong and often do go wrong. The startup capital is high, the risks are even higher. When you finally build a mine it can flood, break down, earthquakes, power outages increase the risks etc… In space, there is a myriad of additional factors to contend with together with the ridiculous costs of extracting any ore.
The biggest problem is that space mining will be the end of space mining. What do I mean? Say that some fantastic company manages to fund R&D of space mining equipment and employs it, they complete exploration and drilling of samples, build a mine etc…
Now any minerals worth mining to offset the costs that they bring back will vastly reduce the prices of those minerals on earth’s exchanges due to supply and demand. These space mines would effectively hit nails into their own coffins.
Michael A
Astrophysicist have figured out a formula for warp technology. Not to mention h3 is a large fuel source that can be mined right off the Moon and the moon could become a gas station. And if your math is correct you don’t need fuel to get back to Earth if you have enough advanced math to calculate gravity slingshots to send something back to Earth 70% of the way or within capture and towing distance. There have been a lot of breakthroughs in physics recently. I suggest you read some instead of getting your information from SyFy TV shows although they are fun and open your imagination.
Jack
Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.
Robert A. Heinlein
Vilena
We dont need climate change to destroy us. Or even peak oil. Theres also peak soils and peak metals, we are close to those as well and weve passed some peaks. Technology needs rich soils to stand on, tech and resources available are interrelated. We have maybe 15 years before its just too expensive to give every american a car and a cell phone all at the same time. Also food and water, we could have another dust bowl any one of these years. That could wrench high technology out of our hands and send us back to horse and buggy, pencil and candles. So we dont have 100 years to wait for elon musks to save us, maybe only 15. Drastic quality of life losses, losses of medicine and people living in shanty towns.